Chotu (Cho) Padamsee was born in Bombay, now Mumbai, in 1932. His father was a property owner and successful businessman, running a furniture and glassware business. In April 1937 the entire family of seven children, together with their parents, travelled to the UK and Cho and 2 of his brothers were placed as boarders at Ellesmere College, Shropshire. They remained as pupils there until c1939, when they returned to India. Cho subsequently attending a high school in Bombay before entering St Xavier’s College, Bombay University – also attended by his brother, the future actor and producer, Alyque Padamsee (1928-2018). Both siblings appear to have also lived in the UK, at some point after the end of the Second World War, and are recorded as travelling back to India in July 1951. Cho was to return again, however, enrolling on the five-year Diploma course at the Architectural Association (AA), London, in 1957. After his AA Second Year Padamsee was advised to gain practical experience and spent four months in Athens working for the acclaimed Greek architect Perikles A. Sakellarios, the father of Cho’s year-mate and friend, Elisabeth Sakellarios. He subsequently also spent four months with the London practice of Michael Lyell, before re-entering the AA Third Year in 1960. For his final AA Diploma year, Cho opted to study with the AA’s Department of Tropical Studies. One of his projects, for a school in Bagdad (jointly authored with Patrick Wakely), was published in the AA Journal of April 1963. Two years after graduating, Cho returned to the Department as a member of teaching staff, rising to become a Senior Tutor in 1967 and Deputy Head in 1968. Following the transfer of the Department to University College London in 1971, to form the Development Planning Unit, Cho remained as Deputy Head, before moving to Rotterdam to take up the position of Director of Studies at the Bouwcentrum International Education (now the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies (HIS), Erasmus University). Cho also began working for the UN in the 1970s, assisting in the development of the 1976 HABITAT Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver (Habitat I). A spell as Head of the Hull School of Architecture followed, where Padamsee was hailed as introducing the UK’s first system of work-based learning within architectural education. By the mid-1980s Cho had returned to University College London and inaugurated a new MSc course at the Bartlett, entitled ‘Building Design for Developing Countries’. He was subsequently to serve there as Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Studies in the late 1980s. In his sixties, Cho moved back to India and settled in Goa, where he was appointed the Principal of Goa College of Architecture, in Panaji. Following his retirement, Padamsee remained in Goa, where he died in 2009.
With grateful thanks to John Harvey and Paul Russell of Ellesmere College Archive.
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